Progressive leader on why she isn't running

Jim Douglas seems like a nice guy. He remembers everyone's name and often something about our individual story. But his economic policies have driven Vermont into a ditch. I'm sure he believes that if you give Entergy and IBM and other multinational companies what they want, it will benefit all of us in the long run. But, it hasn't. The vast majority of new "jobs, jobs, jobs" come from small startups, not from big business.

I'm sure he believed that laying off 800 state employees and cutting programs was the right choice. But it wasn't. Those 800 additional families on unemployment means the economy gets worse, those paychecks don't go to pay bills in local communities any more, and 800 new families need unemployment and other benefits. We just keep digging the hole bigger and bigger.

So we need a new approach. And unfortunately, Brian Dubie, who is also a nice guy, is a pale copy of Jim Douglas, likely to continue 95 percent of the Douglas policies with 95 percent of the Douglas administration and advisors.

We need some economic stimulus: building housing, building roads, building solar farms and windmill farms and biomass generating facilities. Our farmers can grow the biomass crops; we can bring back manufacturing jobs to build the renewable energy facilities, and we can emerge with a whole new economy based on producing renewable energy components for the rest of the country once they wake up and realize the folly and the impossible costs of coal and oil and nuclear.

We Vermonters have always been practical. When farming began to be a losing proposition, we built woolen mills. When the woolen mills disappeared, we built ski areas. Now it is time to develop innovations in both our energy production and our manufacturing sector, time to explore worker owned businesses that are owned by Vermont employees, businesses that won't leave the state to find cheap labor elsewhere.

These things are not going to be done under a Dubie administration. I will work with our next governor to follow through on closing Vermont Yankee, lowering the cost of health care, building alternative and renewable means of energy generation and re-establishing Vermont as a leader in environmental protection, energy innovation and a thriving agricultural sector and protecting the most economically vulnerable. And we will all continue to work with a new crop of legislators from all three parties to head in a new direction for our state and begin to solve these problems that, until now, have been recycled but not resolved.

A common sense approach to our problems means finding leadership that cares more about the solution than about the special interests, more about people than ideology. A common sense approach to politics means that, this year, I will decline the Progressive nomination for governor, a nomination I sought in order to ensure that the Progressive Party would not have a candidate in that race this year. Some day there will be a voting system that will give Vermont voters a real choice between more than two candidates in the general election. But we are not there yet. We have a lot of work to do together.

This commentary appeared in the Burlington Free Press on August 29, 2010.